He pulled one packet free. The paper inside was stiff, sealed against damp. Charts filled the first page. Arrows moved from ring habitats to surface districts to labor zones below. Notes in the margin, clean and calm, discussed pressure on reproductive lines, pairing control, education thinning by class burden, selective memory treatment after transfer stress. No alarm. No shame. Just process.

“Managed breeding pressure,” Elias said before he meant to speak at all. “Labor sorting by inherited tolerance markers. Cognitive softening in low-risk populations. Periodic edit cycles to reduce cross-class recall.”

Lina stared at the pages as if they were in a language from a dream. “What does that mean?”

He looked at another sheet, a diagram of figures split into channels under labels so plain they turned the stomach.

“It means,” he said, hearing the paper shake in his hand, “this was planned. Not collapse. Not accident after the floods. Design.”

Mara snatched a second document, scanned it, and all the stillness went out of her. “Intake age windows,” she said. “Behavior smoothing for transfer children.” Her finger dug into the line hard enough to bend the page. “Retention loss accepted within humane threshold.”

She laughed once with no humor in it. “Humane.”

Elias took another packet, faster now, his mind racing ahead in hard bright tracks despite the smoke of shock rising through him. Here was the thing he had only inferred from murals, from hidden labor, from the upper city’s soft blankness. Here was the written spine under the whole body.

“We need copies,” he said.